Last year, thanks to my colleague Sheela Prakash, I fell madly in love with jacket potatoes. As Sheela explains in her ode to the British take on the classic baked potato, a longer baking time at a lower temperature makes Russet potatoes incredibly crisp on the outside and super fluffy on the inside. So when Martha Stewart shared a method for something similar using Yukon gold potatoes on her Instagram page, I knew I had to try it.

If you count up the whole year, every day of lunches, from now until summer break, did you know that back to school means packing 180 school lunches? I’ll let you sit with that for a moment. Whether your district started back to school virtually or you’re adjusting to a new normal in person, getting your kids to help with lunch will obviously make your life a little easier. Just like any new skill, teaching your kids to prep and pack their own lunches takes time and patience.

Salads are a staple of healthy eating. Add in the fact that a good salad requires zero cooking, and I’m won over. But I am a salad-lover who is also a mom of two. And when guests come over, they are often surprised to see me making salad for my kids—and more surprised to see the kids eating it. How do I do it? The answer is actually simple: I make finger salads.

At 5, my youngest has officially left the toddler years, but the struggles of feeding a toddler are not too far away from my memory. Toddlers bounce from happy and inquisitive to tired and cranky easily without the capacity to tell us that they are hungry and headed for a meltdown. All of this is to say that after a day, or a week, or even hours of extraordinary emotional highs and lows and generally wrestling a wild, stubborn 2-year-old, you are tired. And you all still need to eat.

Do you remember the absolute joy you’d feel when your mom would pop open a can of biscuit dough and a package of bite-sized sausages — meaning pigs and a blanket were on the horizon? Our version embraces that exuberance, but we’re upgrading the whole thing. Thanks to our smart technique, you don’t have to individually wrap 50 tiny sausages to create the perfect bite of flaky, buttery pastry and smoky sausage (but more on that later).

Getting kids to try new foods is simply an exercise in marketing. Case in point: When I made falafel for dinner one night, I called them chickpea nuggets instead of falafel and my children gobbled them right up. They asked for chickpea nuggets again and it got my mind churning with an idea for an actual chickpea nugget recipe — one with all the flavors and textures of chicken nuggets, but baked and egg-free.